# Broad Strokes

There are a number of major problems with TERA that we aim to solve:

* Most of the overworld is lifeless and functionally pointless at endgame, with players mostly congregating in a few major cities or near dungeons and fishing spots.
* As with many MMOs before it, the leveling experience is largely a waste of time, a miserably boring experience, and teaches you almost nothing for the endgame.
* Dungeons during leveling are largely a joke in terms of difficulty, and similarly, there's often a huge difficulty gap between normal and hard mode dungeons, where normal modes are too easy.
* Every major patch brings in a new set of gear or overhauls the gear system, such that players feel little attachment to their gear, or burn out from the gearing treadmill.
* Seasonal dungeon rotations mean that players can be stuck with dungeons they dislike for many months at a time, leading to some going on hiatus.
* There is not much for players to do in the game once they have finished their daily dungeon runs; this results in players spending a lot of time AFK in major cities or fishing.
* As with most free-to-play MMOs, monetization efforts hurt character progression systems badly.
* Lack of any kind of official scripting API has led to an explosion in third-party tools based on network interception, not all of which has been positive.

There's a litany of smaller tangential problems, but these are the most significant ones that deserve the most effort.
